Mind, body and spirit

Dr. John Lucas (’93) says his leadership style is modeled after some of his coaches in high school and college, including at JMU.

“I use the athletics analogy all the time,” said Lucas, the founding dean and chief academic officer of the new Illinois College of Osteopathic Medicine at The Chicago School. “These are amazingly intelligent, high-performing, highly trained people — anatomists, physiologists, internal medicine doctors, surgeons. My job is not to do their job better than them. I could never do that. I just want to get the best out of them every day, so that they have what they need to succeed.”

Lucas draws inspiration from his playing days as the long snapper on the Dukes football team. He spent two seasons in the early 1990s under then-head coach Rip Scherer. “He was a great leader and a great motivator,” Lucas said. “I still quote him 30 years later.”

Lucas’ passion for sports — he tried out twice for the JMU baseball team and played one summer in the Rockingham County Baseball League — is rivaled only by his passion for medicine. “I’ve wanted to be a doctor since I was 8 years old,” he said.

A pre-med student who majored in Psychology at JMU, Lucas attended medical school at the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine in his native Pennsylvania. Osteopathic medicine involves a holistic approach to care that emphasizes the connection between the mind, body and spirit, he explained. “A lot of people don’t know about osteopathic medicine, but we make up one-quarter of the medical students in the United States, and we practice in every specialty. It’s mainly a difference in philosophy and approach to care.”

Lucas completed his residency in emergency medicine in Allentown, Pennsylvania, before working as an emergency-room doctor for a decade at Carilion Clinic in Roanoke, Virginia. He then made the leap into academia. For three years, he served as associate dean of the Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine’s campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. Then he moved to Charleston, South Carolina, to help build residency programs throughout the Southeast for HCA Healthcare, the largest for-profit, health-care company in the U.S.

After rejoining the leadership team at VCOM during the COVID-19 pandemic and serving as dean of one of its campuses in Auburn, Alabama, Lucas heard of an opening for a dean of a new medical school in Chicago, the Windy City’s first in nearly 100 years. The Illinois College of Osteopathic Medicine at The Chicago School will welcome its inaugural class in July.

Lucas said the college will place greater emphasis on the intersection of mental and physical health, and the personal wellness of its students. “There are a lot of medical schools that are putting more time into student wellness, but I don’t know of any that have embraced the concept as fully or as completely as we have,” he said.

As a former ER doctor, Lucas is all too familiar with the emotional toll on physicians. “You’re caught in this space where you’re surrounded by tragedy. Most of the patients you see are having their worst day, but you can’t really dwell on the humanity of it because there’s so much of it. … Doctors like to think of themselves as superhuman somehow. But I’m telling you, we’re not. We’re just regular people with regular gray matter [in our brains], and it’s affected just like everybody else.”

Lucas said he wants his students “to have that resilience, that sense of wellness, [and] to know what they need and how to take care of themselves, so they can have long careers in medicine.”

Lucas and his wife, Rina (’94), a professional singer, painter and poet, are working with Director of Planned Giving Kathy Sarver (’03M) to make a legacy gift to JMU, possibly to include scholarships for aspiring artists and student-athletes looking to go on to medical school.

“We’re kicking around all of those ideas and how we could make an impact that would be lasting and in line with things that we’re really passionate about,” he said.